THE WEEKEND WARRIOR MARCH 31, 2023
A THOUSAND AND ONE, RYE LANE, TETRIS, THE LINE, SPINNING GOLD, SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING, and More!
As mentioned last week, I’m back in the studio this week, making it much tougher to write any sort of review column, and next week is even less likely because I have a crossword puzzle tournament (and Wrestlemania!) over the weekend… but I will do my best. That’s all I can really do,
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES (Paramount)
I’ve already reviewed it, and also, already wrote about its box office prospects both at Above the Line and Gold Derby, so not much else to say here.
HIS ONLY SON (Angel Studios)
A movie that I’ll probably never see is the latest faith-based film from Angel Studios, who are branching off into distribution after having success with releasing the streaming series The Chosen into theaters nationwide via Fathom Events. This is supposed to be opening in 1,800 theaters, which should be enough to get into the top 10, but maybe not quite into the top 5.
But really, this column is more about reviews now, so let’s get to some…
A THOUSAND AND ONE (Focus Features)
A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature stars Teyana Taylor (Coming 2 America) as Inez, a mother just released from prison, who tries to get her son Terry out of the foster care system, by kidnapping him. Over the course of 15 years, we see how the relationship between mother and son both grow and change with the evolution of New York City and specifically their home in Harlem.
In case you hadn’t heard about this movie when it premiered at Sundance, Focus Features played it there before its theatrical release, where it ended up winning the illustrious Grand Jury prize. I saw it back then virtually and watched it again more recently, and in both cases, it took me a good hour to really get into the story that Rockwell was trying to tell. Taylor is pretty fantastic, but her character, especially in the early parts of the movie, is pretty deplorable and inexcusable in her behavior and attitude towards her young son. As he gets older, he starts bonding with the man she claims is his father, a guy named Lucky (William Catlett), but even his patience is constantly being tested by Inez.
Part of what makes the movie better as it goes along, is that the actor playing Terry (there are three) gets older, and each actor is successfully better in terms of interacting with the adults in the film. By the time we get to the older teen (played by Josiah Cross), you’re fully invested in this young man’s journey as much as his mother’s. In some ways, the film’s triptych format reminded me a bit of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, though it works better here because the younger actors are generally better.
I definitely give a ton of credit both to Taylor and Rockwell for pulling off a drama about such a difficult subject (with a bonafide third act twist), but the movie also ends up being a bit of a downer, so it’s hard to fully recommend it to everyone. That said, there really haven’t been that many movies that get into the problems inherent with the New York City foster care system and how parents regularly lose their kids to that system, with neither fully recovering. But it also ends up being an interesting portrait of New York City in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and how it changed.
As much as I’d like to see this movie find an audience and do well, it’s quite another tough sell for Focus, who is constantly looking to push smaller indies out into nationwide theaters when there’s so much more accessible stuff available. A Thousand and One (a title never explained, mind you) is a terrifically-realized drama that might not be for everyone, but that doesn’t make it any lesser.
Rating: 8/10
Let’s look at the weekend box office and how things might go. I was going back and forth quite a bit between Dungeons & Dragons and John Wick winning the weekend, but then a wiser (hopefully) head prevailed, and I realized that the former has so much money coming in from previews even before Friday, that it could really bump up its opening weekend.
1. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Paramount) - $32.6 million N/A
2. John Wick: Chapter 4 (Lionsgate) - $31.4 million -57%
3. Creed III (MGM) - $4.5 million -45%
4. Shazam! Fury of the Gods (New Line/WB) - $4.4 million -52%
5. Scream VI (Paramount) - $4.3 million -48%
6. His Only Son (Angel Studios) - $3.8 million N/A
7. A Thousand and One (Focus Features) - $2.3 million N/A
8. 65 (Sony) - $1.5 million -52%
9. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Marvel/Disney) - $1.3 million -48%
10. Cocaine Bear (Universal) - $1.1 million -47%
Although A Thousand and One could have been this week’s “Chosen One,” it just as likely could have been…
RYE LANE (Hulu)
Hitting Hulu on Friday is Raine Allen-Miller’s British rom-com which also premiered at Sundance, and I also watched virtually. It stars David Jonsson as Dom, who is getting over a rough break-up after catching his girlfriend Gia sleeping with his best friend Eric. He then meets Yas (Vivian Oparah) at an art exhibit for a birthday party meet cute, and they walk around London, talking to each other about stuff.
Yeah, it might not sound that exciting, but both Jonsson and Oparah are very funny, really elevating the material, written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia. This reminded me a lot of Southside By You, a really underrated film that played at Sundance 7 years ago, and it’s another great offering of proof (like A Thousand and One above) that it’s still very much a discovery festival where movies made by and starring practically unknowns can explode. There are aspects of this that reminded me a bit of After Hours, in terms of being a single day movie, but also the Linklater “Before” movies (which are currently playing at the IFC Center– see below!)
Yas is particularly hilarious, as she tries to get her Tribe Called Quest record back from her ex. Although the movie loses quite a bit as it goes along, I really liked the duo quite a bit, and it’s just a cute and sweet rom-com that I found myself really enjoying. On top of the great writing and acting, the movie has a particularly vibrant look, almost neon and bright with really colorful costumes and production design that really adds to the experience.
I’m not sure what kind of audience this might find on Hulu, but at least I know that it will be seen there, and hopefully more people will discover the amazing talent involved in this unassuming and unexpectedly enjoyable film.
Rating: 8/10
TETRIS (Apple TV+)
After a week in limited release, this movie directed by Jon S. Baird (Stan & Ollie) hits Apple TV+, starring Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers, an industrious businessman who tries to buy the rights to this video game created by a Russian man, whose work is being exploited by the Russian government and others in the late ‘80s before the presumed end of communist Russia in 1989. The story is a lot more complex than that, involving a lot of different factions trying to get rights to the game particularly for what would be the first handheld gaming system, the Nintendo game boy.
The first of them is Toby Jones’ Ben Stein, who buys the rights from a Soviet video game company, but then there’s also the wealthy Robert Maxwell and his son Kevin at the British Mirrorsoft, who also has some sort of rights to the game
This is a two-hour movie, and the last hour really drags as everyone is going back and forth to Russia to try to get those handheld rights. At times, things get a little confusing and also sometimes quite ridiculous with lots of fisticuffs and even a car chase. When there are so many “based on true story” movies coming out of the ‘80s, there’s bound to be some artistic license, but in this case, it sometimes just goes too far. (And this comes from someone who loved Cocaine Bear, mind you.)
I generally liked Egerton in this role, and the stuff with his Japanese family and that of the Tetris inventor dealing with the Russian government adds a great deal of warmth to an otherwise clinical film. It was also kind of interesting to see this so soon after Ben Affleck’s Air (review coming soon) and how the two movies handled an abundance of characters and a story where you kind of already know how it ends.
Tetris will definitely hold some interest to long-time gamers and those who may not have known what was going on behind the scenes of that simple game involving falling blocks, but it’s not a movie that bears repeat viewing so much, and there’s so much going on that a lot of it is quickly forgettable. Like many movies this weekend, this isn’t going to for everyone.
Rating: 7/10
THE LINE (Metrograph Press)
Opening this Friday at New York’s Metrograph is the new movie from French-Swiss filmmaker Ursula Meier about a feud between musician Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) and her mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) that turns violent, so the judge declares that Margaret needs to stay 100 yards away from her mother, and her younger sister Marion (Elli Spagnolo) even paints a line to make sure Margaret complies.
I generally liked this movie but maybe didn’t love it, although to be fair, I did see the trailer for this maybe a dozen times in front of other things at the Metrograph. (It is a movie they’re releasing as a distributor after all.)
The movie starts with a physical altercation set to opera music, which is a little strange since you don’t really know anything about the characters or why they’re fighting, and honestly, I can’t even remember if that’s explained. But I did enjoy it mainly due to the cast Ms. Meier has assembled, including the always great Tedeschi. Spagnolo was particularly good as Margaret’s younger sister, who plays a fairly large part in the story, but it’s really Blanchoud who offers the most dramatic fireworks.
I’m not sure I can recommend The Line highly to everyone, because not everyone is going to be along for the ride (and as I mentioned to someone else recently, French films are a tough sell in this country at the BEST of times), but when it comes to family drama, there are enough twists and turns to keep you invested.
Rating: 7/10
SPINNING GOLD (Hero Entertainment)
Jeremy Jordan stars as Neil Bogart, founder of Casablanca Records, in this biopic written and directed by Bogart’s son Tim Scott Bogart, which tells how his father came to fame and discovered so many popular acts like Kiss and Donna Summer while also losing money at an alarming rate. The movie co-stars Michelle Monaghan as Bogart’s first wife Beth (about whom the famous Kiss song is about), as well as Dan Fogler, Jay Pharoah, Chris Redd, and lots of modern-day recording artists portraying and performing as some of Bogart’s acts, including the Isley Brothers, Gladys Knight, Kiss, Donna Summer, and more.
This is a movie that I was almost bound to like or love based on the subject matter and how much AM radio I listened to in the ‘70s. I never really was a Kiss fan so much, but I know a lot of the hits songs that were written under Bogart’s aegis.
Spinning Gold definitely has problems, starting with the fact that it uses a fairly typical musical biopic format, basically telling Bogart’s story in chronological order after an opening framing sequence, but with Jordan as Bogart talking to the camera about himself, which is not something that often works. I’m also a huge Jason Isaacs fan, but I can’t really forgive the fact that his role as Bogart’s father, Al Bogatz, means we get a flashback to when Neil was a kid and Isaacs is playing his father clearly meant to be 25 years younger. On the other hand, I love Monaghan in everything she does, and this movie is no exception.
But a lot of Spinning Gold relies on Jordan and whether you like him as a character and actor. I wasn’t really that familiar with his previous work, but he’s obviously a former Broadway kid, which does make him feel much more comfortable in the musical portions of the film, particularly when he gets involved with singing with his artists. Much of it seems like artistic license for the filmmaker to make his father look better. (We can’t forget that Bogart and Casablanca essentially invented payola, where they would bribe DJs to play their records.)
Spinning Gold also gets bucketloads of credit for being able to get all of the original hit songs from Bogart’s career, from the Isleys’ “It’s Your thing” to Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” to the Kiss songs that are used. Some of the actors are just significantly better portraying their real-life characters like Tayla Parx as Donna Summer and Ledisi as Knight, and because of that, those scenes offer the film some of its best warmth. I wasn’t nearly as crazy about the younger actors portraying Kiss, because that seemed borderline karaoke or pantomime with no real personality. (No, I didn’t recognize Sebastian Maniscalco as disco mega-producer Giorgio Moroder.) The final original song performed by Jordan with many of the others is just a showstopper (in a good way), because we essentially get a musical recap of the movie we just watched.
There’s little question that Spinning Gold has some great moments and performances to match, but I wish I liked it more, since it just felt all over the place in terms of tone in telling Bogart’s story while still being the most basic and traditional biopic possible.
Rating: 6.5/10
Note: I’m a little curious how wide Spinning Gold will be released and how much promotion it’s getting to justify it.
SPACE ODDITY (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
Kyra Sedgwick’s directorial debut premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year (and I got to speak to her back then, an interview you can read over at Below the Line.) It stars Kyle Allen as Alex McAllister, a young man who has decided to leave earth and take a spaceship to Mars on a one-way trip. No, he’s not a NASA-trained astronaut or a friend of Elon Musk or Matt Damon in The Martian. He then meets Alexandra Shipp’s Daisy, who makes him change his mind. I’m not going to write a full review, because it’s been a while since I’ve seen ths, but it’s a perfectly fine rom-com but just not on the same level as Rye Lane.
Let’s get to some REAL genre films next, shall we?
SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING (Magnet Releasing)
Quentin (Rubber) Dupieux’s latest absurdist comedy involves a Power Rangers-like group of heroes called the Tobacco Force, who generally use their abilities to emit deadly toxic gases to fight kaiju-like creatures. When their leader, Chief Didier, a giant goo-dripping rodent of some kind (voiced by Alain Chabat), decides they need to bond, he sends them on a camping trip to do so. What could possibly go wrong besides everything?
As with many of Dupieux’s films (and film in particular), I went into this one not knowing anything about it other than having seen the image of Tobacco Force and wondering how Saban doesn’t have their lawyers sending cease and desist letters.This started out great with some fun kaiju-like action, but then when the Tobacco Force start sitting around a campfire telling each other scary stories. One of them involves a “thinking cap” that literally forces to wearer (in this case, Adèle Exarchopoulos’ Celine) to realize that her husband and friends are all idiots and that she should kill them. Another story involves a young man whose feet get caught in some kind of wood thresher, much to the concern of his aunt, who just makes things worse in her attempts to get him out. And then their evil arch-villain, Lizardine (Benoît Poelvoorde) unleashes
There’s also a running storyline about the two women in the group – Anaïs Demoustier’s Nicotine and Oulaya Amamra ‘s Ammonia – being in love with their leader, who seems to get his share of beautiful women despite being a grotesque rat-looking creature.
There were definitely things I enjoyed in Dupieux’s latest – and not just how hot the women look in those jumpsuits, honest! – but I enjoyed their robot assistant Norbert 500 (replaced later by Norbert 1200) and how unapologetically absurd Dupieux can get in terms of the ideas he introduces to what could potentially be the closest he’s veered into populist science fiction. (His early film Rubber was about a killer tire, so if you’re already acclimated to Dupieux’s work, Smoking Causes Coughing won’t be too out there for you.)
As much as I live Dupieux’s inimitably quirky style of storytelling and his enthusiasm for excessive gore, Smoking Causes Coughing just doesn’t have enough real weight to its story to keep the viewer invested. When it suddenly ends, you’re unsure whether you want more or wish you hadn’t sat through its relatively short run time to begin with.
Rating: 6/10
ENYS MEN (NEON)
Mark Jenkins’ horror film is set on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast in 1973 where a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine) keeps a running journal of a rare flower that “turns into a metaphysical journey that forces her as well as the viewer to question what is real and what is nightmare.” It sound a lot like Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, which was also released by NEON, but I haven’t had time to check it out yet.
MALUM (Welcome Villain Films)
This new distributor is releasing its second horror film after Hunt Her, Kill Her (which I haven’t seen) from a few weeks back. Directed by Anthony DiBlasi, this is a reimagining of his 2014 horror film, Last Shift, starring Jessica Sula as a new police officer assigned to a decommissioned police station, who begins experiencing paranormal events. No idea how wide this is, but not sure it’s wide enough to get into the top 10, that’s for sure.
INVIAGGIO: The Travels of Pope Francis (Magnolia)
Gianfranco Rosi (Fire At Sea) is at least the second, maybe third, filmmaker to make a doc about Pope Francis, this one covering the first nine years of his pontificate as he travelled to 53 countries across the globe.
MURDER MYSTERY 2 (Netflix)
Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston reunite as detectives Nick and Audrey, who are trying to get their agency off the ground in the sequel to the popular 2019 comedy, which I somehow never got around to watching. Their latest mission has them trying to find their Maharaja friend who has been kidnapped at his own wedding.
Also starting this week is the annual (the 17th!) “Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema,” which runs from Thursday through April 2, including at some downtown venues like the https://metrograph.com/category/makingwaves/, the DCTV Firehouse Cinema and Roxy Cinema.
Since Ursula Meier will be onhand for the debut of her newest film, The Line, Metrograph will also be showing her previous movies Sister (2012) and Home (2009) as part of “Permeable Boundaries: The Films of Ursula Meier.”
Starting this Friday is “Lensed by Agnès Godard,” focusing on the work by the cinematographer of Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (2004), Beau Travail (1999), Trouble Every Day (2001), all of which will be shown as well as more. Ms. Godard will be on hand for intros and QnAs Friday night.
“Metrograph Presents A to Z” is mostly showing some of the same movies from the past few weeks, with the addition of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and Hong Sang-Soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). (Both shows of the latter are already sold out this weekend.)
“Also Starring… Karen Black” has a screening of Born to Win on Thursday night but mostly will take this weekend off. Ye Lou’s Suzhou River (2000) continues to screen through the weekend.
Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity continues to screen for another week, while Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ‘45 has to end on Thursday (today), although Bertolucci’s The Conformist is back by popular demand. This Sunday’s “Film Forum Jr.” is The Jackie Robinson Story from 1950.
This isn’t the first time where two of New York’s downtown theaters end up playing the same movies, but as part of “Three by Denis,” IFC is ALSO showing Beau Travail, as well as Chocolat (not that one), and White Material (which I highly recommend). This weekend, it’s also screening Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, the second in his series of three dramas starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. (It’s still screening its predecessor Before Sunrise, as well.)
On Sunday, Amy Heckerling will be in person for a screening of her film Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
The Roxy is continuing its (Other) Paul Williams Retrospective, plus it will also premiere Cristin Mungiu’s RMN as part of “Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema” (which isn’t repertory… obviously.)
Other movies I just couldn’t get to…
BETWEEN SINS (Buffalo 8)
THE ANTS AND THE GRASSHOPPER (Giant Pictures)
BHOLAA (Reliance Entertainment)
THE UNHEARD (Shudder)
STALKER (Gravitas Ventures)
Next week, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (which I won’t have seen before writing anything resembling a column), Ben Affleck’s Air (which I still have to review), as well as Owen Wilson in IFC Films’ Paint